“What’s the worst that could happen?”
Usually, when you utter these words, you invoke the risk of tempting fate with something unpleasant happening to you. To be fair, trying new things out all the time is not for everyone. Sometimes, there are situations where the risks involved can be deadly.
Thankfully, I won’t be talking about blatantly-dangerous scenarios. Instead, I’ll talk about how and why taking risks is essential when learning a language.
Yes, this is another post about learning languages. By now, you should have the idea that this is one of my passions.
As you may have read in a previous post, I currently live in Japan, working as an Assistant Language Teacher with the Nagasaki City Board of Education. You can imagine how challenging it may be to live and work in a country where most people don’t speak English confidently, if at all. This is made more challenging by my limited Japanese language ability. Yes, I can use basic sentence structures, and I try to speak the language as much as possible. There’s just only so much I can achieve with a limited vocabulary.
Yet, the key is that I try to communicate in the Japanese language. While I already know basic sentence structures, I’m slowly learning to use complex sentences and speak casually. If necessary, I can always use simple appropriate English words if I can’t say them in Japanese.
I just need to remember to pronounce them the Japanese way, which can be tricky given my longstanding stuttering issues. Try saying “Portugal” in Japanese. Even I get tripped up saying that slowly.
Learning languages require you to be confident in making mistakes. No one is ever perfect. Even the most eloquent speaker of any foreign language has made countless mistakes communicating in it. To paraphrase an appropriate quote, if you want to master a skill, you need to fail many times at it.
Even Grammarly is fond of the quote, “To err is human”.
I’ve definitely made my fair share of mistakes while speaking in Japanese, especially when I’m working at an elementary school. For example, it can be confusing when you’re trying to decide which particles you have to use. Thankfully, if my colleagues notice me using incorrect Japanese to explain something, they will step in to correct me. As a result, my Japanese knowledge increases, and I can avoid making similar mistakes while teaching future classes.
My vocabulary has also improved to the point where I can recognise what I’m typing. This has helped me a lot when creating online quizzes for my fifth- and sixth-grader. By writing questions in Japanese, I can introduce difficulty levels to any single test by gradually shifting the language used from Japanese to English.
Trying. Making mistakes. Learning from these mistakes. These three actions are essential to the learning process, and you have to give them a fair go if you want to become better at a language. Wishful thinking and grumbling about your lack of ability will get you nowhere. As I’ve already alluded to, the only way to build up a skill is to make mistakes in the first place!
My mother has recently started to learn Korean due to her addiction to Korean Netflix dramas. I’m also learning some basic German because I’ve started listening to more heavy metal songs in the German language. We’ll be making mistakes along the way, and that’s totally fine by us.
When you put aside your fear of judgement, there’s absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain by giving a foreign language a fair go and making mistakes.